Professor Emerita, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University

Main menu

Curriculum Vitae and More

Biographical Summary

Jean Berko Gleason is one of the world’s leading experts on children’s language. She currently is professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University and is also a faculty member and former director of BU’s Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics. She has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Harvard, and the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard/Radcliffe. She has been president of the International Association for the Study of Child Language, and is the author and editor of leading textbooks on language development and psycholinguistics. She created the Wug Test, the best known experimental study of children’s language acquisition. She has published more than 125 articles on aphasia, language attrition, language development in children, gender differences in parents’ speech, and cross‑cultural differences. Her work is frequently cited in the professional literature, and has been featured in the popular press and on television. She is currently featured in the PBS award-winning online Nova Science Now series “The Secret Life of Scientists” as well as on the Web at the World Science Festival.